Using CiviCRM. Develop and implement a fully functional, systematic CRM plan for your organization Using CiviCRM

Joseph Murray, Brian P Shaughnessy, Dave Greenberg

CiviCRM is a web-based, open source CRM system, designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations. Elected officials, professional/trade associations, political campaigns and parties, government agencies, and other similar organizations are among its growing number of enthusiastic users. This book shows you how to harness CiviCRM’s impressive array of possibilities as you develop and execute performance-critical CRM strategies.This book will help you become familiar with the structure and main functions of CiviCRM. It will guide you in developing and successfully implementing a CRM strategy for your organization using detailed explanations and practical examples.Using CiviCRM walks you through developing a CRM Implementation Plan that is suited to your organization's size, culture, and needs. Readers will take away many constituent relationship management best practices and the knowledge of how to implement them with CiviCRM. Benefits of Using CiviCRM will be felt across your organization, and help it better achieve its mission.Overall, your organization will interact with constituents more effectively and handle staff growth and transitions by tracking all contacts and interactions with them in a system shared across the organization. Gathering and analyzing data about your constituents and their interactions with your organization will better inform your decisions.If your organization fundraises, you’ll be able to raise more money and reduce costs by identifying qualified prospects for targeted fundraising initiatives. We show how to attract new prospects and convert them to donors using online, direct mail, telemarketing and direct contact channels Using CiviCRM. You’ll learn why and how to set up and then grow your monthly donor program, as well as improve the frequency, average donation amounts, and retention rates of your donor base.With this book you’ll be able to reduce the burden on administrative resources by providing online payments and self-service options for event registrations and membership renewals. You can increase the likelihood your existing subscribers will become more involved with your organization, ensure more of your members show up to volunteer, identify potential leaders and steward their volunteer activitiesFinally, you'll be making relevant information easily available that quantifies what a great job you've been doing, including the number of hours that volunteers gave to your organization last year, the number of cases managed, or the number of new viral signups from your latest urgent action e-mail.

Learning VirtualDub: The Complete Guide to Capturing, Processing and Encoding Digital Video. The complete guide to capturing, processing and encoding digital video

John Buechler, Georgios Diamantopoulos, Sohail Salehi, Avery Lee

VirtualDub is one of the most popular video processing applications for Windows. As an open source application, it's free, and is constantly updated and expanded by an active community of developers and experts. VirtualDub is particularly popular for capturing video from analogue sources such as video tape, cleaning up the image and compressing it ready for distribution over the Internet. This book provides a rapid and easy to use tutorial to the basic features of VirtualDub to get you up and running quickly. It explains how to capture great quality video from various sources, use filters to clean up the captured image and add special effects. The book also shows how to use VirtualDub to cut and paste video to remove or insert sequences, including removing ad breaks or trailers. It goes on to cover the art of effective encoding and compression, so you end up with great quality videos that won't hog your bandwidth forever. VirtualDub is the fastest and most effective way to capture, process and encode video on your PC. This book gets you started fast, and goes on to give you full control of all the features of this legendary tool.

Phalcon Cookbook. High Performance PHP Framework

Serghei Iakovlev, David Schissler

Phalcon is a high-performance PHP framework delivered as a PHP extension. This provides new opportunities for speed and application design, which until recently have been unrealized in the PHP ecosystem.Packed with simple learning exercises, technology prototypes, and real-world usable code, this book will guide you from the beginner and setup stage all the way to advanced usage. You will learn how to avoid niche pitfalls, how to use the command-line developer tools, how to integrate with new web standards, as well as how to set up and customize the MVC application structure. You will see how Phalcon can be used to quickly set up a single file web application as well as a complex multi-module application suitable for long-term projects. Some of the recipes focus on abstract concepts that are vital to get a deep comprehension of Phalcon and others are designed as a vehicle to deliver real-world usable classes and code snippets to solve advanced problems. You’ll start out with basic setup and application structure and then move onto the Phalcon MVC and routing implementation, the power of the ORM and Phalcon Query Language, and Phalcon’s own Volt templating system. Finally, you will move on to caching, security, and optimization.

Data Visualization: a successful design process

Andy Kirk, Andy Kirk

Do you want to create more attractive charts? Or do you have huge data sets and need to unearth the key insights in a visual manner? Data visualization is the representation and presentation of data, using proven design techniques to bring alive the patterns, stories and key insights locked away.Data Visualization: a Successful Design Process explores the unique fusion of art and science that is data visualization; a discipline for which instinct alone is insufficient for you to succeed in enabling audiences to discover key trends, insights and discoveries from your data. This book will equip you with the key techniques required to overcome contemporary data visualization challenges. You'll discover a proven design methodology that helps you develop invaluable knowledge and practical capabilities.You'll never again settle for a default Excel chart or resort to fancy-looking graphs. You will be able to work from the starting point of acquiring, preparing and familiarizing with your data, right through to concept design. Choose your killer visual representation to engage and inform your audience.Data Visualization: a Successful Design Process will inspire you to relish any visualization project with greater confidence and bullish know-how; turning challenges into exciting design opportunities.

Azure OpenAI Essentials. A practical guide to unlocking generative AI-powered innovation with Azure OpenAI

Amit Mukherjee, Adithya Saladi, Marco Casalaina

Find out what makes Azure OpenAI a robust platform for building AI-driven solutions that can transform how businesses operate. Written by seasoned experts from Microsoft, this book will guide you in understanding Azure OpenAI from fundamentals through to advanced concepts and best practices.The book begins with an introduction to large language models (LLMs) and the Azure OpenAI Service, detailing how to access, use, and optimize its models. You'll learn how to design and implement AI-driven solutions, such as question-answering systems, contact center analytics, and GPT-powered search applications. Additionally, the chapters walk you through advanced concepts, including embeddings, fine-tuning models, prompt engineering, and building custom AI applications using LangChain and Semantic Kernel. You'll explore real-world use cases such as QnA systems, document summarizers, and SQLGPT for database querying, as well as gain insights into securing and operationalizing these solutions in enterprises.By the end of this book, you'll be ready to design, develop, and deploy scalable AI solutions, ensuring business success through intelligent automation and data-driven insights.

Sculpting in ZBrush Made Simple. Explore powerful modeling and character creation techniques used for VFX, games, and 3D printing

Lukas Kutschera

Embark on a creative journey with ZBrush, the leading software for creating characters, creatures, and props in films, games, and 3D printing. This guide will take you through its powerful yet user-friendly workflows, allowing you to explore its dynamic organic sculpting, painting, and hard-surface modeling tools.The first part of this book is dedicated to helping you become familiar with ZBrush’s user interface and learning the very basics, from sculpting brushes and painting the model with Polypaint to setting up lights and rendering images. You’ll also create a demon bust with the help of ZBrush’s concept sculpting tool, DynaMesh. In the second part, you’ll get to grips with the creation of a humanoid character that is optimized for 3D printing. Focusing on anatomy, poly-modeling, and preparing the model for 3D printing, you’ll acquire the skills essential for sculptors. The final part delves into portrait sculpting, where you’ll learn everything from basic facial anatomy to hair creation with FiberMesh.By the end of this book, you'll have developed the expertise necessary to succeed in the ever-evolving world of 3D character modeling, complemented by portfolio and social media tips for showcasing your standout work.

Kubernetes - An Enterprise Guide. Effectively containerize applications, integrate enterprise systems, and scale applications in your enterprise - Second Edition

Marc Boorshtein, Scott Surovich

Kubernetes has taken the world by storm, becoming the standard infrastructure for DevOps teams to develop, test, and run applications. With significant updates in each chapter, this revised edition will help you acquire the knowledge and tools required to integrate Kubernetes clusters in an enterprise environment.The book introduces you to Docker and Kubernetes fundamentals, including a review of basic Kubernetes objects. You’ll get to grips with containerization and understand its core functionalities such as creating ephemeral multinode clusters using KinD. The book has replaced PodSecurityPolicies (PSP) with OPA/Gatekeeper for PSP-like enforcement. You’ll integrate your container into a cloud platform and tools including MetalLB, externalDNS, OpenID connect (OIDC), Open Policy Agent (OPA), Falco, and Velero. After learning to deploy your core cluster, you’ll learn how to deploy Istio and how to deploy both monolithic applications and microservices into your service mesh. Finally, you will discover how to deploy an entire GitOps platform to Kubernetes using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

Oracle 11g R1/R2 Real Application Clusters Essentials. Design, implement, and support complex Oracle 11g RAC environments for real world deployments

Syed Jaffer Hussain, Ben Prusinski, Benjamin Scott Prusinski

Oracle RAC or Real Application Clusters is a grid computing solution that allows multiple nodes (servers) in a clustered system to mount and open a single database that resides on shared disk storage. Should a single system (node) fail, the database service will still be available on the remaining nodes. Oracle RAC is an integral part of the Oracle database setup. You have one database with multiple users accessing it, in real time. This book will enable DBAs to get their finger on the pulse of the Oracle 11g RAC environment quickly and easily.This book will cover all areas of the Oracle RAC environment and is indispensable if you are an Oracle DBA who is charged with configuring and implementing Oracle11g R1, with bonus R2 information included. This book presents a complete method for the configuration, installation, and design of Oracle 11g RAC, ultimately enabling rapid administration of Oracle 11g RAC environments.This practical handbook documents how to administer a complex Oracle 11g RAC environment. Packed with real world examples, expert tips and troubleshooting advice, the book begins by introducing the concept of Oracle RAC and High Availability. It then dives deep into the world of RAC configuration, installation and design, enabling you to support complex RAC environments for real world deployments. Chapters cover Oracle RAC and High Availability, Oracle 11g RAC Architecture, Oracle 11g RAC Installation, Automatic Storage Management, Troubleshooting, Workload Management and much more.By following the practical examples in this book, you will learn every concept of the RAC environment and how to successfully support complex Oracle 11g R1 and R2 RAC environments for various deployments within real world situations.This book is the updated release of our previous Oracle 11g R1/R2 Real Application Clusters Handbook. If you already own a copy of that Handbook, there is no need to upgrade to this book.

Multi-Cloud Handbook for Developers. Learn how to design and manage cloud-native applications in AWS, Azure, GCP, and more

Subash Natarajan, Jeveen Jacob

Unleash the power of cloud computing with Multi-Cloud Handbook for Developers, your guide to mastering the nuances of cloud-native and multi-cloud, covering practical strategies for design, development, and management. Explore the essential concepts, challenges, and methodologies critical for navigating the complex landscape of modern cloud computing.Using core architectural and design principles (such as microservices and 12-factor architecture) and advanced strategies (such as distributed application design patterns, domain-driven design (DDD), and API-first strategies), you’ll learn how to build portable and efficient apps across various cloud platforms. You’ll understand how to leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC), continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), GitOps, and DevOps practices, along with containerization and orchestration techniques using Docker and Kubernetes. You’ll also get to grips with data, security, compliance, and cloud cost management strategies in multi-cloud environments.With real-world case studies, best practices, and insights into future trends, this book will equip you with the skills to develop, manage, troubleshoot, and innovate cloud-native applications across diverse cloud platforms, positioning you at the forefront of the cloud computing revolution.

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming. Write clean, robust, and maintainable web and server code using functional JavaScript - Second Edition

Federico Kereki

Functional programming is a paradigm for developing software with better performance. It helps you write concise and testable code. To help you take your programming skills to the next level, this comprehensive book will assist you in harnessing the capabilities of functional programming with JavaScript and writing highly maintainable and testable web and server apps using functional JavaScript.This second edition is updated and improved to cover features such as transducers, lenses, prisms and various other concepts to help you write efficient programs. By focusing on functional programming, you’ll not only start to write but also to test pure functions, and reduce side effects. The book also specifically allows you to discover techniques for simplifying code and applying recursion for loopless coding. Gradually, you’ll understand how to achieve immutability, implement design patterns, and work with data types for your application, before going on to learn functional reactive programming to handle complex events in your app. Finally, the book will take you through the design patterns that are relevant to functional programming.By the end of this book, you’ll have developed your JavaScript skills and have gained knowledge of the essential functional programming techniques to program effectively.

BeagleBone By Example. Click here to enter text

Pei JIA, Jayakarthigeyan Prabakar, Alexander Hiam

BeagleBone is a low cost, community-supported development platform to develop a variety of electronic projects. This book will introduce you to BeagleBone and get you building fun, cool, and innovative projects with it. Start with the specifications of BeagleBone Black and its operating systems, then get to grips with the GPIOs available in BeagleBone Black. Work through four types of exciting projects: building real-time physical computing systems, home automation, image processing for a security system, and building your own tele-controlled robot and learn the fundamentals of a variety of projects in a single book. By the end of this book, you will be able to write code for BeagleBone in order to operate hardware and impart decision-making capabilities with the help of efficient coding in Python.

Real-World Next.js. Build scalable, high-performance, and modern web applications using Next.js, the React framework for production

Michele Riva

Next.js is a scalable and high-performance React.js framework for modern web development and provides a large set of features, such as hybrid rendering, route prefetching, automatic image optimization, and internationalization, out of the box. If you are looking to create a blog, an e-commerce website, or a simple website, this book will show you how you can use the multipurpose Next.js framework to create an impressive user experience. Starting with the basics of Next.js, the book demonstrates how the framework can help you reach your development goals. You'll realize how versatile Next.js is as you build real-world applications with step-by-step explanations. This Next.js book will guide you in choosing the right rendering methodology for your website, securing it, and deploying it to different providers, all while focusing on performance and developer happiness. By the end of the book, you'll be able to design, build, and deploy modern architectures using Next.js with any headless CMS or data source.

Hands-On Business Intelligence with DAX. Discover the intricacies of this powerful query language to gain valuable insights from your data

Ian Horne

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is known for its ability to increase efficiency by extracting new information from data that is already present in your model. With this book, you’ll learn to use DAX’s functionality and flexibility in the BI and data analytics domains.You’ll start by learning the basics of DAX, along with understanding the importance of good data models, and how to write efficient DAX formulas by using variables and formatting styles. You’ll then explore how DAX queries work with the help of examples. The book will guide you through optimizing the BI workflow by writing powerful DAX queries. Next, you’ll learn to manipulate and load data of varying complexity within Microsoft products such as Power BI, SQL Server, and Excel Power Pivot. You’ll then discover how to build and extend your data models to gain additional insights, before covering progressive DAX syntax and functions to understand complex relationships in DAX. Later, you’ll focus on important DAX functions, specifically those related to tables, date and time, filtering, and statistics. Finally, you’ll delve into advanced topics such as how the formula and storage engines work to optimize queries.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained hands-on experience in employing DAX to enhance your data models by extracting new information and gaining deeper insights.

Pretrain Vision and Large Language Models in Python. End-to-end techniques for building and deploying foundation models on AWS

Emily Webber, Andrea Olgiati

Foundation models have forever changed machine learning. From BERT to ChatGPT, CLIP to Stable Diffusion, when billions of parameters are combined with large datasets and hundreds to thousands of GPUs, the result is nothing short of record-breaking. The recommendations, advice, and code samples in this book will help you pretrain and fine-tune your own foundation models from scratch on AWS and Amazon SageMaker, while applying them to hundreds of use cases across your organization.With advice from seasoned AWS and machine learning expert Emily Webber, this book helps you learn everything you need to go from project ideation to dataset preparation, training, evaluation, and deployment for large language, vision, and multimodal models. With step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, you’ll go from mastering the concept of pretraining to preparing your dataset and model, configuring your environment, training, fine-tuning, evaluating, deploying, and optimizing your foundation models.You will learn how to apply the scaling laws to distributing your model and dataset over multiple GPUs, remove bias, achieve high throughput, and build deployment pipelines.By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to embark on your own project to pretrain and fine-tune the foundation models of the future.

Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading. Predictive models to extract signals from market and alternative data for systematic trading strategies with Python - Second Edition

Stefan Jansen

The explosive growth of digital data has boosted the demand for expertise in trading strategies that use machine learning (ML). This revised and expanded second edition enables you to build and evaluate sophisticated supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models.This book introduces end-to-end machine learning for the trading workflow, from the idea and feature engineering to model optimization, strategy design, and backtesting. It illustrates this by using examples ranging from linear models and tree-based ensembles to deep-learning techniques from cutting edge research.This edition shows how to work with market, fundamental, and alternative data, such as tick data, minute and daily bars, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, financial news, or satellite images to generate tradeable signals. It illustrates how to engineer financial features or alpha factors that enable an ML model to predict returns from price data for US and international stocks and ETFs. It also shows how to assess the signal content of new features using Alphalens and SHAP values and includes a new appendix with over one hundred alpha factor examples.By the end, you will be proficient in translating ML model predictions into a trading strategy that operates at daily or intraday horizons, and in evaluating its performance.

Mastering QGIS. Go beyond the basics and unleash the full power of QGIS with practical, step-by-step examples

Martin Dobias, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, John Van Hoesen, ...

Mapbox Cookbook. Over 35 recipes to design and implement uniquely styled maps using the Mapbox platform

Bill Kastanakis, Vasileios Kastanakis

Maps are an essential element in today’s location aware applications. Right from displaying earth surface information to creating thematic maps displaying plethora of information, most of the developers lack the necessary knowledge to create customizable maps with combination of various tools and libraries. The MapBox platform is one such platform which offers all the tools and API required to create and publish a totally customizable map.Starting with building your first map with the online MapBox Editor, we will take you all the way to building advanced web and mobile applications with totally customizable map styles. Through the course of chapters we’ll learn CartoCSS styling language and understand the various components of MapBox platform and their corresponding JavaScript API.In the initial few chapters we will dive deeper into the TileMill and MapBox Studio components of MapBox and use them to generate custom styled map tiles and vector maps. Furthermore, we will publish these custom maps using PHP, node.js and third party tools like Geoserver.We’ll also learn to create different visualizations and map styles like a choropleth map, a heat map and add user interactivity using a UFTGrid. Moving on, we dive into advanced concepts and focus on integration with third party services like Foursquare, Google FusionTables, CartoDB, and Torque to help you populate and even animate your maps.In the final chapter we’ll learn to use the Mapbox SDK to create and publish interactive maps for the iOS platform. By the end of this book, you will learn about MapBox GL and how to create a fully functional, location-aware mobile app, using the maps styles created in the recipes.

Low-Code Application Development with Appian. The practitioner's guide to high-speed business automation at enterprise scale using Appian

Stefan Helzle

This book is an exhaustive overview of how the Appian Low-Code BPM Suite enables tech-savvy professionals to rapidly automate business processes across their organization, integrating people, software bots, and data. This is crucial as 80% of all software development is expected to be carried out in low code by 2024.This practical guide helps you master business application development with Appian as a beginner low-code developer. You'll learn to automate business processes using Appian low-code, records, processes, and expressions quickly and on an enterprise scale. In a fictional development project, guided by step-by-step explanations of the concepts and practical examples, this book will empower you to transform complex business processes into software.At first, you’ll learn the power of no-code with Appian Quick Apps to solve some of your most crucial business challenges. You’ll then get to grips with the building blocks of an Appian, starting with no-code and advancing to low-code, eventually transforming complex business requirements into a working enterprise-ready application.By the end of this book, you'll be able to deploy Appian Quick Apps in minutes and successfully transform a complex business process into low-code process models, data, and UIs to deploy full-featured, enterprise-ready, process-driven, mobile-enabled apps.

Cloud Analytics with Microsoft Azure. Transform your business with the power of analytics in Azure - Second Edition

Has Altaiar, Jack Lee, Michael Pena

Cloud Analytics with Microsoft Azure serves as a comprehensive guide for big data analysis and processing using a range of Microsoft Azure features. This book covers everything you need to build your own data warehouse and learn numerous techniques to gain useful insights by analyzing big data.The book begins by introducing you to the power of data with big data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, artificial intelligence, and DataOps. You will learn about cloud-scale analytics and the services Microsoft Azure offers to empower businesses to discover insights. You will also be introduced to the new features and functionalities added to the modern data warehouse.Finally, you will look at two real-world business use cases to demonstrate high-level solutions using Microsoft Azure. The aim of these use cases will be to illustrate how real-time data can be analyzed in Azure to derive meaningful insights and make business decisions. You will learn to build an end-to-end analytics pipeline on the cloud with machine learning and deep learning concepts.By the end of this book, you will be proficient in analyzing large amounts of data with Azure and using it effectively to benefit your organization.

Metabase Up and Running. Introduce business intelligence and analytics to your company and make better business decisions

Tim Abraham

Metabase is an open source business intelligence tool that helps you use data to answer questions about your business. This book will give you a detailed introduction to using Metabase in your organization to get the most value from your data.You’ll start by installing and setting up Metabase on your local computer. You’ll then progress to handling the administration aspect of Metabase by learning how to configure and deploy Metabase, manage accounts, and execute administrative tasks such as adding users and creating permissions and metadata. Complete with examples and detailed instructions, this book shows you how to create different visualizations, charts, and dashboards to gain insights from your data. As you advance, you’ll learn how to share the results with peers in your organization and cover production-related aspects such as embedding Metabase and auditing performance. Throughout the book, you’ll explore the entire data analytics process—from connecting your data sources, visualizing data, and creating dashboards through to daily reporting.By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to implement Metabase as an integral tool in your organization.

XR Development with Unity. A beginner's guide to creating virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences using Unity

Anna Braun, Raffael Rizzo

The drastic surge in the demand for XR development has led to an imminent need for comprehensive resources, learning material, and overall know-how in this area. This one-stop resource will ensure that professionals venturing into XR development can access all XR-related techniques to build appealing XR applications, without relying on Google every step of the way.This book is your guide to developing XR applications with Unity 2021.3 or later versions, helping you to create VR, AR, and MR experiences of increasing complexity. The chapters cover the entire XR application development process from setting up an interactive XR scene using the XR Interaction Toolkit or AR Foundation, adding physics, animations, continuous movement, teleportation, sound effects, and visual effects, to testing and deploying to VR headsets, simulators, smartphones, and tablets. Additionally, this XR book takes you on a journey from the basics of Unity and C# to advanced techniques such as building multiplayer applications and incorporating hand- and gaze-tracking capabilities.By the end of this book, you'll be fully equipped to create cutting-edge XR projects for engaging individual, academic, and industrial use cases that captivate your audience.

Learn Amazon SageMaker. A guide to building, training, and deploying machine learning models for developers and data scientists

Julien Simon, Francesco Pochetti

Amazon SageMaker enables you to quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models at scale, without managing any infrastructure. It helps you focus on the ML problem at hand and deploy high-quality models by removing the heavy lifting typically involved in each step of the ML process. This book is a comprehensive guide for data scientists and ML developers who want to learn the ins and outs of Amazon SageMaker.You’ll understand how to use various modules of SageMaker as a single toolset to solve the challenges faced in ML. As you progress, you’ll cover features such as AutoML, built-in algorithms and frameworks, and the option for writing your own code and algorithms to build ML models. Later, the book will show you how to integrate Amazon SageMaker with popular deep learning libraries such as TensorFlow and PyTorch to increase the capabilities of existing models. You’ll also learn to get the models to production faster with minimum effort and at a lower cost. Finally, you’ll explore how to use Amazon SageMaker Debugger to analyze, detect, and highlight problems to understand the current model state and improve model accuracy.By the end of this Amazon book, you’ll be able to use Amazon SageMaker on the full spectrum of ML workflows, from experimentation, training, and monitoring to scaling, deployment, and automation.

The iPhone Manual - Tips and Hacks. A complete user guide to getting the best out of your iPhone and iOS 14

Wallace Wang

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone available on the market, renowned for its sophisticated design, immersive UI, and user safety. And even if you’ve bought an iPhone for its impressive specifications, you may still be unaware of many of its features, which you’ll discover with the help of this book!The iPhone Manual is your practical guide to uncovering the hidden potential of iPhones, and will leave you amazed at how productive you can be by learning tips and hacks for customizing your device as a communication, entertainment, and work tool. You’ll unearth the complete range of iPhone features and customize it to streamline your day-to-day interaction with your device. This iPhone manual will help you explore your iPhone’s impressive capabilities and fully understand all the features, functions, and settings that every iPhone owner should know. With this book, you’ll get to grips with not only the basics of communication but also best practices for accessing photos, videos, and music to set up your entertainment using your iPhone. In addition to this, you’ll learn about serious work tools that will make you productive in your everyday tasks.By the end of this iPhone book, you’ll have learned how to use your iPhone to perform tasks and customize your experience in ways you probably didn’t realize were possible.

XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide. The best way to start creating your own games is simply to dive in and give it a go with this Beginner’s Guide to XNA. Full of examples, tips, and tricks for a solid grounding

Kurt Jaegers

XNA Game Studio enables hobbyists and independent game developers to easily create video games. It gives you the power to bring your creations to life on Windows, the Xbox 360, the Zune, and the Windows Phone platforms. But before you give life to your creativity with XNA, you need to gain a solid understanding of some game development concepts.This book covers both the concepts and the implementations necessary to get you started on bringing your own creations to life with XNA. It details the creation of four games, all in different styles, from start to finish using the Microsoft XNA Framework, including a puzzler, space shooter, multi-axis shoot-'em-up, and a jump-and-run platform game. Each game introduces new concepts and techniques to build a solid foundation for your own ideas and creativity. Beginning with the basics of drawing images to the screen, the book then incrementally introduces sprite animation, particles, sound effects, tile-based maps, and path finding. It then explores combining XNA with Windows Forms to build an interactive map editor, and builds a platform-style game using the editor-generated maps. Finally, the book covers the considerations necessary for deploying your games to the Xbox 360 platform.By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation of game development concepts and techniques as well as working sample games to extend and innovate upon. You will have the knowledge necessary to create games that you can complete without an army of fellow game developers at your back.